primary presidency meeting agenda template

PRIMARY PRESIDENCY MEETING AGENDA TEMPLATE PDF
PRIMARY PRESIDENCY MEETING AGENDA TEMPLATE TV

We must give journalists material to understand and write about European parties. We must give researchers the tools to discuss and analyse European parties. This also means, short of adequate efforts by EU institutions, ensuring the periodic provision of official information in a user-friendly manner, and helping citizens get acquainted with their political parties.Īnd not just citizens, who will not suddenly wake up craving knowledge about European political parties they don’t know. This challenge reversed years of practice of heavy redactions, sealing the Parliament’s reasoning for up to eight years after the facts. Either by amending legislation or changing practices.įor instance, in June, European Democracy Consulting successfully challenged the European Parliament’s long-standing legal arguments on the redaction of its documents regarding European parties. This means continued pressure on decision-makers in the Commission, Parliament, and national governments to increase transparency, and to adopt a user-centric approach aimed at making information visible – not merely on a duty to publish documents. Those concerned with the strengthening of European democracy must push again and again for more transparency on European parties. No charts, no appealing tables, no visualisations.ĭespite this, successive reviews to the Regulation on European political parties have failed to dramatically increase transparency – in 2007, 2014, 2018, 2019, and another one currently under discussion: a bit more information here, a few more documents there, but information remains scattered and invisible to citizens.Įven European parties themselves, most likely limited by their own national member parties’ desire to retain the upper hand, fail to extensively reach out to citizens – as one would expect, at the very least, ahead of European elections.įaced with this institutional apathy, there is no quick fix or magical solution: we must play the long game.

PRIMARY PRESIDENCY MEETING AGENDA TEMPLATE PDF

The European Parliament and the Authority for European political parties – both in charge of monitoring European parties – dutifully publish the minimum amount of information legally required of them, often as dull collections of PDF documents. Unfortunately, this opportunity is not seized.

PRIMARY PRESIDENCY MEETING AGENDA TEMPLATE TV

While established sources of information – newspapers, radio, TV – continue to focus largely on local and national politics, the digital space provides an opportunity to reach out to citizens.

And, therefore, without citizens knowing their political parties. Even if all Member States were democracies (surely a big “if” these days), there can be no European democracy – democracy at the European level, that is – without two-way interactions between citizens and their European political parties. It is therefore not sufficient to say that we should have democracy at the local level, and at the regional level, and at the national level, but that anything beyond that does not matter.Īnd this is the pitfall of the European Union. A precondition to these interactions is for citizens to, at least, know the political parties that claim to speak and decide in their name – and this, at each level at which decisions are made. This engagement by citizens takes many forms, from addressing one’s representatives, to making donations to candidates and parties, to being a member or militant of a political party, all the way to becoming a candidate or setting up one’s own political party.ĭemocracy therefore requires continuous, two-way interactions between citizens and their parties and elected officials. It is also a process through which citizens actively contribute to the political landscape via their input and engagement, and where political actors, in turn, respond to citizens. But representation need not be – and clearly should not be – the mere choice of our political leaders once every few years. Modern, liberal democracy is based on representation. The European Democracy Consulting Stiftung is an Austrian non-profit, which runs the European Party Funding Observatory. Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, voter suppression in the US, and democracy backsliding in Hungary and Poland all highlight the importance of a robust and healthy democracy, which must never be taken for granted, writes the European Democracy Consulting Stiftung.

Primary presidency meeting agenda template